


(a little) Human

by seekingsquake



Category: The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Insomnia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 06:59:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8479642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingsquake/pseuds/seekingsquake
Summary: Bruce isn't as human as he used to be, and it's an issue. But maybe not for everyone.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This has taken me SO. LONG. I'm putting it up to get it away from me. Take it as it is. I am finished. Blech.

When he wakes it’s instant, like a light flicked on or a cat startled from sleep. There is no slow descent into consciousness, no leisurely stretching, yawning, lazy blinking. There is no adjustment. There is black nothingness, void emptiness that very suddenly gives way to everything all at once. He knows that it isn’t like this for most people, knows that this isn’t average, but he’s never been very good at being like most people. He’s never been very average.

He wakes, and it’s a snap and it’s happened, blink and you’ll miss it sort of waking. He opens his eyes and it’s finished. It’s saved his life (no it hasn’t--it’s only kept him free--) on more than one occasion. Most days though, he opens his eyes and is awake, and then closes his eyes again. He goes through the motions of waking like an average person; shifts under his covers, yawns big, stretches long. Alerts others slowly, naturally (unnaturally), to the fact that he is now no longer asleep. This, too, has saved his life on more than one occasion. 

He’s learned that average people feel most comfortable when they think that you’re like them. He’s learned that it’s always safest to keep average people feeling comfortable.

Bruce Banner is not an average person. He’s known that since he was a child. It’s very apparent from the moment he wakes, every single day. But he’s gotten good at faking it. Some days, he even forgets what he is. On good days, he forgets what he’s not.

✧✧✧

Bruce was raised in a home that taught him how to hold his breath, bite his tongue. When he was a child his tongue was the softest, fleshiest part of his body. The rest of him was sharp lines and brittle bones, easy to break. He kept the softest part of himself all to himself, and he bit down whenever he felt weak, whenever he wanted to scream. He thinks back now and he wonders why no one he knows was ever prepared for it when he used his teeth, always ready, always waiting, and bit into the fleshiest parts of them, made them hurt when they showed a weakness unbecoming of them. He’d been practising on himself his whole life, it only makes sense that the moment he was turned inside out he started doing it to others.

It’s gotten to the point now that Bruce is anxious whenever he doesn’t taste his own blood in his mouth because that means he’s giving too much of himself away.

It’s gotten to the point now that when he feels someone else’s blood on his skin or tastes someone else’s blood in his mouth a very large part of him feels sickeningly guilty. A tiny, animalistic part of him always whispers  **that’s what they get. If they’d known to bite their own tongues, you wouldn’t have to** _.  _ A tiny, animalistic part of him is always waiting, mouth open and teeth bared, for the next person to show him vulnerability so he can bite into them and teach them the value of silence. 

He clings to the part of himself that feels guilty and bites down hard, always making sure his own blood is there to distract him from the idea of everybody else’s. Always making sure he doesn’t give any of himself away. When he hurts someone (because he always does) he tells himself over and over  _ you’re a human. You’re just like them. You’re going to stop hurting them. _

There’s always that tiny, animalistic part of him, though, that’s whispering **are you? Are you? Are you?**

He bites down.

✧✧✧

He makes sure to always smile when someone does something nice for him and to always laugh when he hears a good joke. Sometimes, after he responds in a way that he deems appropriate to whatever scenario he’s found himself in, he’ll catch someone giving him an odd look. It’s almost as if they understand what he’s attempted to do, they see how his response was supposed to turn out, and they’re puzzled because he’s somehow missed the mark. He wonders if his smile has become more of a phantom limb than a legitimate movement of his facial muscles, wonders if it only feels like he looks real. Sometimes he looks into the mirror and pulls back his lips, bares his teeth, and can’t tell if he’s twitched his lips into the proper arrangement or if they’ve actually been ripped right off his face and he hasn’t smiled in years.

He practises smiling at himself in his bathroom mirror, hopes maybe he’ll get a better grasp of the idea if he can see his face moving. It usually ends up kind of like the sort of vicious delight that can be found on the faces of chimpanzees while they beat each other to death. His face arranges itself in a way that walks the fine line between manic joy and a terrifying snarl. Those days, he usually decides that it isn’t a good idea to leave his apartment. Those days, he sits on the terrace and breathes deep, tries to keep himself loose and relaxed. His meditation mantra alternates between  _ all humans have bad days  _ and  _ all humans have good days. _

He ignores the voice in his head that asks  **where are your good days?**

He ignores the voice in his head that sneers at the idea of being human.

Some days he stands in front of his bathroom mirror and it’s difficult to arrange his face at all. Each little movement has to be directly and consciously commanded:  _ soften the eyes, relax the jaw, lift lips up at corners, relax face, relax, smile damnit.  _ On those days he wonders if he’s maybe more machine than animal, more machine than human. Maybe his wires got crossed somewhere along the way and every time he makes a mistake it’s because of faulty programming. That is the only way it makes sense, actually, that he finds himself living under the wing of Tony Stark. Tony likes his machines a little faulty, a little quirky, with a little too much stubborn will to do exactly as Tony programmed them. Those days, he usually decides that it’s okay for him to go down to the lab and do some work. Those days he can talk to JARVIS and feel at home amongst all the other quirky machines that Tony hasn’t gotten around to straightening out. It’s okay if his smile doesn’t look proper when he’s in the lab because JARVIS doesn’t have a face and Tony will just chalk it up to Bruce being ‘in the zone’, to being focused and diligent, to making up for all the time he’s lost over the years. Those are okay days. He can look at himself and his situation objectively.

When the voice in his head asks **where are your good days?** he silences it by saying _I was able to wake up like a normal person three days out of seven last week. I forgot I wasn’t like them for about ten minutes each time. Those are my good days._

✧✧✧

The change from Bruce- mostly human to Hulk- not human, is painful. The line between the two of them is always a little blurry at best, at least to him, but as his body morphs and his mind splinters the line is broken completely. On the outside, for the others it’s simple: one second he’s small and pink and Bruce. The next second he’s big and green and Hulk.

It’s not so simple from the inside. Sometimes his thoughts go first, changing from full sentences to fractured thoughts to wordless ideas that leave him roaring with frustration at the inability to understand even himself. Themselves. Sometimes his body goes first, limb by limb, muscle by muscle breaking down, rearranging, turning into something that shouldn’t be possible, that has never been recreated. What’s been happening more often as of late though, is that the two aspects of it blend together, blurring the line between himself and Hulk even more. It starts with the registering of the fact that he can’t control his situation, then is followed by the swelling of his chest, arms, shoulders. The pain seeps through, permeates everything, and he’s chasing his thoughts like children chase bubbles in the wind, catching up with them only long enough to break them apart. He always wonders if this time will be the last time he sees the world as Bruce, wonders if he won’t make it back out from underneath the animal inside of him this time. His spine is next, then his legs, and it hurts so much, too much, he’s dying, he’s dying,  _ why can no one see that I’m dying  _ and suddenly everything he thought he knew has been replaced with rage. The animal is howling. The animal is him. He doesn’t know when it happens, where in the change the moment takes place, only that he’s howling and smashing and he can’t even think about it.

But it isn’t the change from Bruce- mostly human to Hulk- not human, that really bothers him. It’s the change back. 

He always finds himself in some sort of ditch or another, as if Hulk had tried to build a nest or burrow before putting himself down and letting Bruce back out. He’s in a ditch, naked, covered in dirt or debris or things he can’t stomach contemplating, and he’s in so much pain that he’s nauseated. He doesn’t know where he is, who he is, how he got there. He lays there and he can’t move and he wants to scream but he hurts too much to even do that. And then he begins to notice others. Steve, Tony, Natasha, hovering at the edge of the ditch, waiting for him to pull himself up and out of the dirt. Every single time he tells himself  _ I can’t, it’s too much, I’m only human. I’d like to see them try. _

Every single time, the voice whispers  **you can, it’s not. You’re not.**

Bruce bites down hard. He stands up. He climbs out of his ditch, smiles when Steve pats him on the back, brushes him off. Smiles when Tony rambles on and on about something cool Hulk did. Smiles when Natasha walks beside him back to the quinjet and says, “He did well today, Doctor.” 

It’s hard to do un-humanly things on command for them and then immediately fall back into the role of being human to keep them comfortable. It takes everything he has every single  time. But mostly human Bruce likes these little people, and not human Hulk likes these little people too, so he’ll play whatever part they ask him to. He bites down hard, tastes his own blood, and does what he has to.

It takes months for him to realize that even with his teeth embedded in the fleshiest part of his body, he’s still giving these people everything. He used to bite down so that he could keep things close to his chest, keep his pain for himself. He wonders why he’s still biting.

✧✧✧

Hulk is invincible. Hulk is the definition of unbreakable. His skin is tough, his bones are tough, his will is tough. If you do manage to crack him open, he heals almost too fast for it to matter. He doesn’t die, won’t stay down, and will not (maybe cannot) feel pain enough to phase him.

Maybe Bruce and Hulk share a body. Maybe Bruce and Hulk are made up of the same things. Even so, Bruce and Hulk are not the same.

Hulk heals all damage done to them in the heat of battle, but Bruce is still left with the pain of bones that should be broken but aren’t, internal organs that had ruptured but are fine, and full body bruises that aren’t visible to the eye because they aren’t there anymore. Hulk heals the damage, but Bruce is left with the phantom pains. It is a plight, though, that he is careful to keep to himself. He doesn’t want the others to know of his (very human-- thank god for that--) weaknesses. He doesn’t want them to bite into him the way he bites into himself, the way everyone he’s ever trusted has bitten into him. 

Hulk is invincible. The team seems to think that Bruce, too, is as such. He lets them. And everything is fine, right up until it isn’t.

A call to arms against some genius maniac sends them all to Switzerland, but for maybe the first time since he was brought in, when he was asked to help find the Tesseract all that time ago, they need Bruce to be Bruce. For the first time maybe ever, they need Tony to be Tony. The others are off taking out the bad guys while Bruce and Tony work behind the scenes, camped out in a stone tunnel deep underneath the mansion of their villain of the day. Everything is going according to plan, everything is perfect, and then they hear Clint shout over the comm, “Cap, the hatch!” 

Steve swears and then orders Bruce and Tony, “Get out of there, now!”

Tony isn’t even wearing the gauntlets, because this wasn’t ever even a possibility when they were planning the mission. Bruce isn’t sure the wireless connection that would call the suit would even work this far underground. And if Hulk makes an appearance, the whole place will fall down on top of them and Tony would be dead. They look at each other, wide eyed and surprised, and then they’re both scrambling to grab their equipment and running.

“If they’re coming down the escape hatch to grab us, where the fuck are we supposed to go?” Tony shouts into his earpiece as he scrambles down the stony corridor.

“Just keep going,” Natasha chimes in over the comm, and she sounds unusually strained. “I’ve got heat sensors tracking you. Thor will bust you an exit as soon as he can. Just keep going. We’ll get you.”

Then the comms fail out, due to trouble above or something else Bruce isn’t sure, but now he and Tony have lost contact with the others while they scurry like mice away from an enemy that wants them dead. “I am not dying in a fucking  _ cave _ ,” Tony snarls, “because I was too busy lugging machinery for SHIELD.” He drops everything and bolts, trusting Bruce to do the same.

The thing about that, though, is that Bruce and Tony are not in the same situation. Physically, yes, they are in the exact same predicament. But in reality, they couldn’t be more farther removed from each other. For Tony, this is life and death. This is dying in an underground tunnel, surrounded by stone walls and men with machine guns, or getting back to the surface. This is doing what he has to to make it out alive, SHIELD be damned, or no surviving. For Tony, this is simple.

Nothing is ever going to be life or death for Bruce, potentially, ever again. Hulk will not let Bruce die down here, will not let Bruce succumb to something as inconsequential as bullets. No, this is much different. He’s going to survive no matter what. If Bruce makes it back to the surface and escapes with Tony, but doesn’t have the information and machinery that SHIELD asked him to grab, he doesn’t know what they’ll do to him. Nothing would happen to Tony because no one would scold him for staying alive, but Bruce is sure that they would punish him. If Bruce tries to hold on to what he’s got, he probably won’t make it to the surface with Tony. He’ll be captured by the enemy, tortured for any information that he may (but probably doesn’t) have, and then who knows what would happen after that. If he lets Hulk out, Tony’s dead. If he doesn’t and he’s captured, he’s screwed. If he doesn’t and somehow Tony’s captured, they’re both screwed. If he doesn’t and somehow Tony ends up dead, it’ll be his fault anyway. 

Tony’s a good thirty or forty feet ahead of him, and Bruce is running, trying to decide whether he should drop the machine he’s still trying to carry, trying to decide if maybe he should just stop running and let himself be caught if that will give Tony more time. He’s stopped thinking, really, about the guns and the bullets and whatnot.

Well, he had. Until he got shot.

Hulk heals all wounds. But Hulk isn’t here right now. Bruce takes a bullet to the thigh about as well as anyone else because when he’s himself he’s very (well, mostly) human. He screams, stumbles, tries to keep running. But then his brain kicks back up and he stops. Tony stops too, turns, moves to come back for him but Bruce screams.

“Tony, go!”

Tony, stubborn as he is, is still moving back towards him.

“No you idiot! My blood’s toxic, and you are  _ not  _ going to die down here. Go!”

“But Bruce-,”  
“No, just go! I’ll be fine, just go!”

Tony is a smart man, a genius. His brain runs through all the scenarios, he sees how hard Bruce is fighting Hulk for control, knows that he needs to get to a place that will be alright for Thor to punch through. But Bruce is the best friend he’s had in a long time, and Tony’s brain doesn’t make him as callous as others think, maybe wish, that it does. He doesn’t want to leave him. But the villains are coming, Tony has nothing to defend himself with, the bullets will kill him, Bruce’s blood could kill him, Hulk could accidentally kill him, and he definitely wants to live. “We’ll come back for you.” He doesn’t know if he screams it or whispers it or only thinks it in his head, but then he’s running down the corridor again.

Bruce lets himself hit the dirt, lets himself take weight off his leg and finally collapse. The human part of him trembles in pain and fear, but that animalistic part of him is screaming to get out, is laughing in the back of his mind, is saying  **these bastards don’t know what’s coming to them** _. _

✧✧✧

Bruce is held captive for three weeks, helpless under a combination of gaseous drugs that keep him drowsy and compliant and a gamma dampening collar that keeps Hulk trapped inside the body of his little human counterpart. They are interrogated, beaten, starved, and it makes them think back to Bruce’s childhood. It was in this type of environment that the seeds of Hulk’s existence took root, and if Bruce had been able to think properly, that would have terrified him. If the animalistic part of him had been able to think properly, it would have said  **there is only room for you and me here** _. _ As it is, he can’t quite be sure of even his own name. 

All the bones in both his feet are shattered. Both his hands are swollen and twisted and broken. His ribs aren’t doing their job of keeping his lungs and heart safe and contained anymore, and he’s missing large strips of skin from his back, thighs, and calves. He’s completely shut down, unresponsive to the questions they ask him, mostly unresponsive to the physical torture they are still trying to carry out. A whine, a grunt, a tremble. He is broken, but instead of cracking open and giving them what they want, he has caved in, locking himself away. 

Bruce is held captive for three weeks before they dump him, beaten, broken, naked, in the higher elevations of the Alps. Hulk, exhausted from pacing inside of his human and still drained of energy from the collar that kept him down, cannot gather the strength to burst forth from the prison of Bruce’s body, cannot find the rage or bloodlust that would help him heal them. 

They lay in the mountains for another two days before they are found. No human would have survived the ordeal, but Hulk isn’t human, and Bruce is only human mostly. If he had been able to think properly, maybe he would have been thankful for that. Maybe not. He is thankful, though, when he hears the roar of Iron Man’s thrusters and the glint off the red and gold paint job hurts his eyes.

✧✧✧

They get him back to the tower, hook him up in the medical bay, and after the examination they beg him to transform.

Tony’s going on about how it’ll be hellish to have Bruce gone from the lab so long, and while his voice is a whine somewhere between a joke and a real inconvenience, his eyes are haunted and he can’t sleep. Natasha goes on about how long it will take for him to heal naturally, outlining the months of rehabilitation and physical therapy it will take to get his body back to anywhere near normal. Clint wonders aloud why Bruce would want to hover in the pain of recovering, and Steve states, “Bruce, you’re only human. You don’t have anything to prove.”

Bruce laughs then, and it’s so painful it brings tears to his eyes, but he can’t stop. Don’t they get it? The animalistic part of him whispers **let me handle this** but Bruce fights back, retaliates with _no, let me._ Because this, this pain, this broken body has to mean something, doesn’t it? That Hulk’s healing factor doesn’t work in Bruce’s skin without him giving over must mean that he’s more human than not, right? This pain is his and his alone, and it puts him on the same level as Clint or Natasha or Tony, puts him on the same level as the little humans that he and Hulk like so much. 

There are tears streaming down his face. It hurts to breathe, hurts to blink, hurts to be alive. His voice is raspy when he asks, “Let me feel this? Please? I need this. I need this.”

They’ve got him on a morphine drip to try and combat the pain, and they all start to file out when the drugs start making him a little loopy. Steve hangs back a little longer, lingering over Bruce because it was his fault that this happened to a member of his team. He hovers, and Bruce is nearly unconscious. Steve’s getting ready to leave for the night when Bruce reaches for him, all his fingers in splints and his hands heavily wrapped. “Steve.”

He pauses just out of Bruce’s reach. “Yeah?”

“Tell me again.”

Steve doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “Um.”

“That thing you said earlier. Tell me again.”

“You’re...,” Steve thinks, can only come up with one thing. “Only human?”

Bruce sighs, and he smiles, and his whole face relaxes. “Again?”

“You’re only human.” Steve doesn’t know why this should be important, doesn’t know why Bruce needs it said to him, but he says it again without being asked. “You’re only human, Bruce.”

Bruce’s eyes slide closed, and he nearly manages to relax against the pillows. “That. That’s what I need to prove, Cap.”

✧✧✧

They need Hulk to smash some bad guys before too long, so Bruce can’t take the full human time to recover. Hulk is happy to stretch his legs and reassert for everyone the fact that he is stronger than the puny humans. And the puny gods. And the puny whatever else is out there. Bruce tries not to think about the fact that he feels like he’s being dragged behind Bugs Bunny’s spinning Tasmanian Devil every time Hulk takes their body for a spin. He tries not to resent the fact that when he gets his body back, all anyone can talk about is how much of a force of nature that animalistic part of him is, how good it is to see that side of him again. Tries not to think about how it seems like they like the not human him better than the mostly human him.

**Where are your good days?**

He ignores it.

✧✧✧

Even as a child, Bruce never had very many friends. Interpersonal relationships were hard for him to grasp, and when he was at school he was too skittish and shy to be any fun. In his twenties he was too focused on his research to have the presence of mind to build relationships outside of work contracts and Betty, and after the accident he learned that friendship is not something for men who cannot be fully human, but cannot be fully anything else either.

Or so he thought.

It happens over video games. Clint had brought his Game Cube to the tower after he had moved in, and he stashed it in the entertainment system in the common living room. He plays Batman games after tough missions, muttering to himself about how he actually is the hero Gotham deserves, damnit, and on days where he is bored and has nothing to keep himself occupied he plays Mario Kart, games that feature Donkey Kong, Pokemon, or skateboarding. He keeps his extensive game collection in an array of boxes that Natasha has under the couch, and although he has given the whole team permission to play whenever they want, pretty much nobody ever does.

But Bruce can’t sleep very well very often, and there’s only so much science he can do when Tony isn’t in the lab to help keep him from going overboard. So it’s nearly two in the morning when he decides maybe games would be good. His thought process in picking a game is simple: Hulk likes Crash because it’s kind of like Smash, and bandicoots are funny little things, and that is how he ends up playing Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex. He’s twenty minutes in when Clint pops up behind him and vaults over the back of the couch to land in a seated position on the other end of the couch from him.

“Dude.” Clint’s voice is quiet but excited as he watches Bruce lead his cartoon bandicoot around the screen. “Dude, how long have you been playing?”

“Twenty minutes, I think. Not long.”

Clint continues to watch, thrumming with energy but not saying much. Another half hour passes before Bruce finishes the game and sets the controller down on the cushion between him and the archer. Clint is grinning this delighted, megawatt grin and looking at Bruce like he’s never seen him before. “How many times have you played that game?”

“Uh. Never. Once now, I guess. Why?”

Clint’s laugh comes from deep within his body, surges up from his gut and rolls past his lips in deep waves. It’s an honest to God, real, pleased laugh, and Bruce isn’t sure he’s ever heard a sound so free from any of his teammates before. “Looks like you need something a little more challenging, huh? You up for a round of something else?”

Bruce pauses for a moment to check in with himself, then nods. “Okay. What are you thinking?”

“Want a little competition? Something harder? I’ve got F-Zero GX; it’s a racing game, but it’s kinda tough if you’re not familiar with it.”

Bruce is perfectly content with a little bit of a challenge, so he agrees.  

Clint has a competitive streak a mile wide, and Bruce has always felt the driving need to prove himself, so anything that pits the two of them against each other is bound to start a war. The thing though, is that Clint is both a very gracious winner and loser, and though Bruce always  _ wants  _ to win, he usually enters into things with the expectation of getting his ass handed to him. They play a couple tracks before he gets the hang of it, and then he’s off, beating Clint to the finish by the hair of his nose every time. Clint laughs and knocks himself companionably against Bruce’s shoulder. “Seriously, is there anything you’re not good at?”

Bruce’s energy is starting to flag. He lets his controller fall onto the cushion between them as he leans back against the couch. “Hmm?”

“You’re a genius, you’re good at video games, you’re a killer good cook, and Nat was saying that you outran her on the treadmill the other day. Is there anything you’re not good at?”

Bruce wants to laugh. He wants to say I _ ’m not good at getting a good night’s rest. I’m not good at cultivating relationships with people. I’m not good at letting things go.  _ Instead he shrugs, says, “I never got the hang of anything that required having a sense of rhythm. I can’t dance or play the drums worth shit.”

“Are you saying the only chance I have of beating you is if we play DDR?” Clint asks, and he’s still sort of laughing, and Bruce is almost drunk on the sound of it. 

“Or that Donkey Kong game with the hand drums. Rock Band, probably. We’ll find others, I’m sure.”

“That’s almost inhuman,” Clint laughs, and Bruce feels like he’s been doused with cold water. He’s too good at too many things. That’s not normal, that’s not okay, that’s not good enough. He manages to mumble something about being tired, about needing to rest, it’s been a long day, really, and he escapes to his room.

He doesn’t sleep though. Not tonight. Not even a little.

✧✧✧

What’s interesting about Clint is that he can be very persistent without ever admitting to the fact that he’s trying to get something from you. Bruce spends a good week trying to actively avoid him, until Clint starts showing up in places that Bruce sort of needs to be.

With a handheld gaming system.

For someone who works for a super secret spy organization, he really isn’t very subtle.

After Tony had insisted that Bruce had to stop eating all his meals in the lab, Clint shows up in the kitchen around the time Bruce is usually there for breakfast, the little twinkle of the music from Pokemon emanating from his GameBoy. He doesn’t try to engage Bruce in any way, just sits at the counter and plays his game, muttering to himself when his path is blocked and grinning when he catches a new creature. Bruce goes about preparing his toast, pouring his juice, eating his breakfast without falling into the obvious trap, but he can’t help but watch Clint’s face, can’t help but want to ask how it’s going. 

Bruce sticks to a routine, likes his days to feel familiar, so he’s down at the gym around the same time every day, using the same treadmill. And Clint starts showing up there, too. He’ll either be there already when Bruce walks in, or he’ll enter the room part way through, and he’ll have a Tamagotchi toy of all things clipped to the waistband of his shorts. It beeps when it needs attention and Clint grins at it fondly as he sips out of a water bottle and Bruce resolutely doesn’t ask.

And in the middle of the night, when Bruce roams the halls because he’s too restless to sleep, Clint is in the common room playing Smash Bros all alone.

The only way it could be any more obvious is if Clint were to turn to him and say, “Hey, grab a controller and help me beat the shit out of these guys.” And then it can’t get any more obvious, because he does. The thing about Bruce is that he’s always afraid, and he’s always angry about it. He’s always holding himself at a distance, and he’s always angry about it. He never gets enough sleep, and he’s always angry about it. He wants the company, he’s tired, and he’s trusting that Clint, as an adult, can make a decent decision and weigh the risks of engaging with something of Bruce’s nature. 

So he sits down and he helps Clint beat the shit out of little animated characters, and Bruce’s character (Clint had insisted that Bruce play as Yoshi, of all things, while he was never anyone other than Kirby) got punted off the battlefield more often that not. They laugh, and Clint knocks himself against Bruce’s shoulder the way that friends sometimes do, and it’s okay. It’s fun. 

And it just keeps happening.

✧✧✧

The concept of having a best friend is sort of strange to Bruce, but maybe that’s because before this particular stage in his life he never had enough friends to really place value of one over the others. And even now that he’s got six roommates that he greatly enjoys and respects, he’s hesitant to say that any one of them is a better friend to him than anyone else. If he were pushed to pick, though, who his best friend might be, he’d probably say Clint.

The thing about Clint is that he’s never been afraid of Bruce, or of Hulk, but that he’s never been reckless with them either. The thing about Clint is that he isn’t overly curious. He’s content to just sit in the living room and play video games, or to go out running with Bruce around Central Park, and just not speak about much of anything. He cracks jokes and makes idle observations, but he never asks for anything of Bruce other than his company. There’s an ease in the quietness that Bruce doesn’t find with any of the others, and the utter lack of effort he has to put forth in order to exist in Clint’s space is a strange but welcome relief. 

“Yo Doc,” Clint says as he strides into the lab, purposeful. Tony glances up and smirks at Bruce a little before turning his attention back to the holographic blueprint he’s working with. “It’s lunchtime, c’mon! There’s a food truck down on the corner of Fifth and we’re gonna go get some of whatever it is.”

Bruce grins at his computer monitor. “You don’t know what kind of food it is?”

“Well, it isn’t Japadog so no matter what it is, it’s gonna dissapoint me a little.”

“What’s Japadog?”

The look that crosses Clint’s face is betrayal bordering on extreme pity, but Tony just laughs. “It’s just a food truck. It’s huge in Vancouver, Canada, and now they’ve got a truck stationed at the Santa Monica Pier. Clint! We could go to California!”

Clint’s eyes flash with interest before he laughs it off and slings his arm around Bruce’s shoulders. “Maybe another time, Shellhead. Bruce and I have a standing lunch date. But fuck yeah man, let’s fly to Cali for Japadog!”

Bruce’s gut clenches with a myriad of emotions that he’s not sure he wants to untangle. There’s a jealousy that he can’t place the source of and a pleasure that he doesn’t want to look at too closely. To distract himself, he stands up from his workstation and lets Clint direct him out the door. 

✧✧✧

There isn’t a lot of build up to it that Bruce can discern. They spend a lot of time playing video games together late at night, they hit up food trucks and little hole in the wall ethnic food places for lunch, and sometimes Clint hangs out in the lab while Bruce runs simulations and crunches numbers and makes scientific breakthroughs. Bruce doesn’t think about the way his skin warms under Clint’s hand any time he casually touches him, or the way his eyes linger on Clint’s biceps maybe just a little too long when he takes his shirt off after a good run. He tries really hard not to think about the fact that Clint has put a lot of time and effort into befriending  _ him _ , someone who is a little too much animal to be completely human, someone a little too other to be compatible for things like interpersonal relationships with men.

Tries not to think about Clint and relationships and himself all at once.

So he’s completely caught off guard. It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday in November. It’s been bitingly cold for weeks, and Clint is always wearing thick socks these days, even though he’s still wearing workout shorts in the tower pretty much all the time. He comes into the living room with two mugs of hot chocolate held precariously in one hand and a bowl of popcorn under his arm. He’s grinning a little goofily when Bruce looks up at him from the couch.

“Need a hand?”

“Nah, man. Pop in Mario Party, let’s do this!”

Bruce beats him at Mario Party, and Clint laughs, and then he just leans a little more into Bruce’s space than usual and kisses him. It’s just a barely there press of lips, and it’s happy and sleepy and soft, and Bruce has his hands on Clint’s face and is kissing him back much more firmly before his brain even catches up with him. And then his brain catches up with him.

His heart is pounding, and his blood is rushing in his ears, and his skin is hot. He scrambles back away from Clint, almost throws himself off the couch in his desperation to get some space between them, and he thinks he might be shaking but he can’t really focus enough to tell. 

“Bruce?”

“I-,” Bruce murmurs, or at least he thinks he does. “I, I, I have to. Go. I have to go. I’m sorry. Fuck. Fuck.” Then he turns tail and bolts for the elevator. He rides up to his suite with a hand spread out over his face and his breath stuttering in his lungs.

✧✧✧

That night he dreams of teeth, bared and bloody, and giant fists clenched around fragile things, and roars that sound like waves beating down islands in storms. He can hear Clint’s voice, and the word inhuman, and he can see himself splintering off into a million little pieces. And underneath it all, he thinks maybe he can hear the echoes of his father’s voice, but he wakes up before he can really figure it out.

✧✧✧

They go back to the way they were before, with Bruce running in place by avoiding the issue and Clint chasing him passive aggressively by putting himself in places that Bruce needs to be. It lasts a little longer than it did the last time, and it probably would have continued if Tony hadn’t conspired with Clint to end it.

Ending it means that Tony “accidentally” locks Clint and Bruce together in the lab. 

“Look,” Clint says, and he’s a little awkward about it. “I don’t mind if you don’t want to be with me. I’m sorry if I crossed a line with you. But if you still want to be friends, I promise I can keep my feelings to myself and I won’t try to kiss you again. I didn’t mean to freak you out or make you feel unsafe in any way.”

The thing is that it’s not that Bruce doesn’t want to be with Clint. The problem is sort of that he does.  _ A lot _ . But he’s not... He hasn’t even entertained the idea of being with someone romantically since The Other Guy came to fruition, barely thought about it before, even. He feels a little like he wants to die when he manages to say, “Clint, I’m... I’m not like you, I--,”

“What do you mean by that? You’re not queer?”

“No, it’s not-- well, I don’t know, I’ve never really... But that’s not what I mean. I mean I’m not like you like I’m not...,”

“Not what, Bruce?”

“I’m not fucking  _ human _ , Clint! I’m a, a, a, I’m some sort of  _ animal  _ or something, I’m--”

“Hey!” Clint shouts, and his voice is sharp and his eyes are angry. “So what if you’re a walking GMO, Bruce! Anything that keeps you alive is all right in my books. Don’t you know how much I care about you? It doesn’t matter to me. Whatever it is that’s in your blood, it doesn’t matter. There is nothing  _ wrong  _ with you. So don’t sit there and tell me that you don’t deserve to be happy just because there’s a little extra chemical stuff in you. And don’t you ever refer to yourself like that in front of me ever again. You’re fucking human Bruce, you  _ are _ .”

“Clint--,”

Everything about Clint softens, but he still keeps going. “Don’t tell me I don’t make you happy; I know that I do. I can see it. And if you don’t want it because you don’t want it, or because you’re not ready, or because you just don’t like me like that, that’s cool. I get it. But if you don’t want it because you think you don’t deserve it, because you think you shouldn’t take it because you think you’re a... Then you’re wrong.”

✧✧✧

He opens his eyes and he’s wide awake. He rolls his shoulder a little to get some feeling back into it outside of the pins and needles static, and he runs his hand over his face. It’s still fairly dark in the room, and he can’t have been asleep for more than a couple of hours. There’s a tiny part of him that thinks  **where are your good days?** but then the bedroom door creaks open and Clint slinks into the room.

“Did I wake you?” he whispers as he crawls in next to Bruce. His hands are cold on Bruce’s skin; he must have just come home.

“No, I was just awake.”

“Kay. Think you can go back to sleep?”

**Where are your good days?**

He curls into Clint a little, tucks himself up small against Clint’s chest, thinks  _ they’re here. They’re now,  _ and he says, “I think so.”

Clint drops a kiss into his curls and then wraps his arms tight around Bruce. “Awesome.”


End file.
